Rosenshine & Liljedahl have roughly the same evidentiary basis for their ideas, yet the ResearchED crowd routinely excoriates one while lauding the other. I don't know what to make of this.
I had never thought about it that way before, that's a great observation. I'm very interested in education research, but I've felt myself becoming more and more bored recently with the randomized controlled trial stuff. It all feels sterile and like it's rehashing the same old ideas. Both Rosenshine and Liljedahl are an important approach, observing teachers, trying things, synthesizing those observations into a larger framework. That's important ed research and is much closer to classrooms, but it's never going to have the authority of a bunch of RCTs.
Hi Dylan. Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean when you say that you are becoming "bored recently with the randomized controlled trial stuff"? Do you mean that you are bored with the argument that those authors don't use RCT's? Thanks.
I'm interested in reading education research, but a lot of RCTs feel very sanitized. It often isn't possible to control exactly one variable in a classroom. So while they can be interesting, I feel like I read versions of the same RCTs over and over again. More descriptive, qualitative research is interesting because it can get at all the connections between different aspects of teaching.
I say this as a big fan (of Dan and his innovation) but with a “critical friend” hat on…
Rosenshine and Liljedahl come from very different research paradigms. Rosenshine studied many teachers across many classrooms to see what the most effective ones had in common. He looked for patterns, then explained those patterns using cognitive science as an explanatory mechanism. His work is broad and steady, aimed at finding what works most of the time.
Liljedahl, on the other hand, works by trying things out with small groups of teachers and students. He tests one idea at a time, changes it, and watches what happens. His work is creative and practical, but fragile. Both offer useful ideas, but they rest on entirely different kinds of evidence and were built in different ways. Implying they are equal in research strength is inaccurate.
I'm not sure I agree. Most of Rosenshine's citations are decades old and some of those fields have evolved since the publications he references. This article explores a bit of what you find when you follow some of those references: https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/criticality-in-evidence-informed-teaching-expansive-learning-with-rosenshine/ Observing teachers is a fraught way to draw broad conclusions, there's so much happening and it's really hard to accurately infer cause and effect.
Rosenshine looked at test scores as indicators of effective teachers. Liljedahl picks a different goal: thinking, which he defines as the opposite of mimicking. There's a value judgment, there, but then he spent a lot of time observing teachers trying different things and picking out the practices that were best at promoting his chosen goal.
I say this as someone who thinks highly of Rosenshine's principles and recommends them. It's really hard to do research that validates a broad construct of effective teaching. You make a good point that Rosenshine uses cognitive science to justify why his conclusions make sense, and that's part of why I find them valuable. But I'm not convinced we can say that Rosenshine's principles are a superior, researched-proven way to teach.
Could it be that there is a positive association between people who prefer a "less direct" style of teaching and people who are associated with the ResearchED crowd mixed with a healthy dose of confirmation bias?
I have my own theory but I don't know if it's true. I believe that DI gets good results (there's a whole world trying to cast DI research as some big conspiracy theory). Here's a comparison. We know that a strong phonics program is important for reading. But some kids don't need it -- they'll learn to read just fine with something much less structured. And if you talk to early elementary teachers on the front lines of the "science of reading" stuff right now, one thing you often hear is that they feel a bit bad for the kids who don't need it, who learn to read fine without it. They feel like it's too boring, too structured, too much. I think you can draw a parallel with DI -- many kids just don't need that much structure. And the longer those programs persist, the easier it is to focus on all the kids who don't need that structure and would be fine. And it's a big lift for leaders to keep the structure in place. So eventually there's a leadership change, and the pump is primed to shift to something a little less structured.
Curious what you think of that argument, it's one of those ideas I've had bouncing around in my head but I'm not sure it makes sense.
"We know that a strong phonics program is important for reading. But some kids don't need it -- they'll learn to read just fine with something much less structured."
I think new leaders come in, the pump is already primed to "change some stuff." In ed leadership, "what gets changed" is usually based on vibes.
I.e., case after case: leaders took away DI, nobody particularly cared even as scores fell steadily....nobody reversed course. There's always plausible excuses that aren't "Ooops we should have kept DI."
We saw that in No Excuses charters, too. And we saw that at Match charter as leaders kept reducing the investment in HDT in favor of teacher vibes.
Great job delving into the nuance - I really appreciated how you go beyond the surface-level dichotomy between inquiry-focused and explicit-instruction-focused teaching models to help teachers see that there are key techniques everyone can benefit from incorporating into their repertoire. I wish we had more flexible curricula that incorporated the best of all worlds and were more thoughtful about which techniques to emphasize for which topics.
Thanks! Agreed. It's interesting to me when an idea pops up in multiple places that approach teaching very differently. For instance, the explicit instruction approaches I referenced in the post are all built on a small-step design, breaking skills down into lots of small pieces and giving students chances to practice with each piece. That sounds a lot like thin slicing in Building Thinking Classrooms. Interesting evidence that those folks are all onto something. Unfortunately my current (official) curriculum is not designed in that way whatsoever...
I completely agree that regardless of what type of instructional approach we use, questions, feedback, and engagement with problems or tasks is where learning happens. To me one of the biggest differences between curriculum that is more direct instruction oriented versus those that are more inquiry based is the length and volume of tasks that students respond to and whether they have been given a worked example before attempting them or if they will intentionally be exploring the task without having seen that. If there was a better understanding of the question and feedback aspect of direct instruction as you explained then there also might be more recognition that the two approaches are not necessarily in opposition and could be logically combined into one lesson format.
Yup. And the other piece is that people learn best when you build on what they already know. To generalize very broadly, I know lots of inquiry-focused teachers who are really good at sequencing ideas and building on what kids already know, checking for understanding and giving feedback, and guiding practice, but aren't great at structuring independent practice or regular review. I know explicit-instruction-focused teachers who are great at the modeling and independent practice pieces, but aren't great at connecting to prior knowledge or breaking content into small steps. Everyone benefits when we build on what they're already good at, and try to help them understand how some new ideas can complement things they're already doing. Coming in and saying "what you're doing is bad and you should step" is a recipe for teachers to ignore you.
This is an important piece, now more than ever. We are so lucky to have so many remarkable educators like Zach helping us become better teachers, but you rightly point out that some of the details get lost in translation. Here's my own example expressed in an email to Zach about his interview with Carl Hendrick.
"Great discussion with the great Carl Hendrick. On the one hand, I hesitate to criticize him. On the other hand, he is very pro-teacher, so as someone who taught Of Mice and Men to sophomores over many years, I feel obligated to weigh in. First, let me echo what the two of you emphasized: direct instruction is highly interactive, which is a must. And I certainly agree that all the fluff (to quote Anita Archer) related to butcher paper assignments that waste time and pull students away from the learning is not the way to go.
BUT--that's not to say that we need to go to the opposite extreme and spoonfeed answers. That exchange between teacher and student about whether George shot Lennie is begging for bringing in the book and looking back for evidence to support what happened. No need for the teacher to give answers because the students are capable of finding them in the text, making claims and supporting them with the author's words.
SO--I found Carl's attitude toward that anecdote super surprising, and, unfortunately, if feeds right into what some educators hate about direct instruction: their perception that students are just given answers rather than being shown how to find them, turning them into passive rather than active learners.
Thanks for sharing! I haven't listened to that episode. Also a good example of how contextual teaching is. It's really hard to make broad generalizations that are true across contexts, everything depends.
The craft of explanation deserves more attention, not less. Most teachers haven’t been taught how to do it well (or at all).
For me, Just Tell Them is about making “explaining” more intentional. Scripting a worked example (or CFU question, or rollout of a new routine) forces you to think hard about precision, sequencing, and terminology. That rehearsal makes the whole lesson tighter (I often toss the script once class starts).
I use Craig Barton’s variation theory resources often. I only script the first worked example. After that, students do the majority of the thinking. But that one clear example sets the tone. It is not the amount of explaining that matters. It is how well you do it.
*Adam Boxer’s Teaching Secondady Science is an exemplar application of the theory in Zach’s book.
I think I agree with you. I learned a lot from Just Tell Them. My issue is more with the framing of the book and the framing of lots of conversations around explicit instruction. You allude to something that I feel strongly -- it's the pieces around the explanations that matter a lot. I also use variation theory as a way to structure practice, and I find that to be a really important variable in setting students up for success.
To give a different example, prior knowledge is a really important piece of explanations. Making sure students know everything they need to know to understand the explanation, and connecting that explanation to what they know. Zach doesn't spend much time on that in Just Tell Them, and that's my biggest criticism of the book. It's another example of how the pieces around explanation are just as important as the explanation itself.
Recently my admin noted the growth shown in my students’ MAP scores; when asked “What did you do?”, I couldn’t respond on the spot in one sentence, because as you said one sentence can’t capture all that I do.
Absolutely. Unfortunately a lot of teachers and leaders like to simplify teaching down to one thing, which often sounds nice but isn't helpful for anyone.
As others mentioned, this was a particularly strong blog by you DK. Nice.
On your "what is powerful besides Just Tell Them"....I would say another feature of Engelmann's DI is the....craftsmanship. The artisanal detail of those instructions is quite high.
Most scripted instruction gets key details wrong, which shows up in real classrooms pretty quickly. The skilled teachers overcome the script, like a great actor in an off off Bway venue overcoming a bad play. But the typical actor can't overcome it; the audience leaves at intermission.
Yea I agree. That was my biggest takeaway -- the thoughtful sequencing alone is something that really impressed me. Then the attention to the structure of examples/non-examples, unambiguous wording, and more. Lots for teachers to learn from.
Even unscripted stuff makes a lot of mistakes. I was talking to a few teacher friends recently about how a lot of publishers seemingly rushed out curriculum in recent years that had obvious, if-you-had-thoroughly-field-tested-this-you-would've-caught-these-mistakes issues. Lessons that completely forget about certain skills, make huge conceptual jumps, don't build off of the representations from last year, and more. It's really hard to do curriculum well, and when you read about the way Engelmann put DI together it's obvious it's just head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of field testing and refining all the little details.
It's not just "rushed" field testing. It's typically ZERO field testing by the publisher.
Moreover, the insane system is EdReports "reviews" currics - without ever watching it inside classrooms. They're like movie reviewers who read the script and never watch the movie.
My story: as Common Core rolled out there were a lot of curricula that moved a few units around, slapped the "Common Core" label on, and called it a day. There was very quickly demand for some way to do quality control on standards alignment. A small, scrappy nonprofit stepped in to fill the void. It did a pretty good job of telling schools whether a curriculum was standards-aligned. But they were the only game in town, no one ever showed up to compete, and a simple service of checking standards alignment became conflated with "is this curriculum good?" Somehow that is now the status quo.
Reading about the field testing DI does is wild. Totally different than anything that happens today. I know a few people who have done some curriculum work and...I don't understand why publishers are in such a massive rush to publish these programs.
Great piece! I appreciate your argument that for all the talk of explanation, that’s not really where most classroom time is allotted in these examples. I also appreciate, and try to practice, the idea of pulling bits and pieces from lots of different curriculums and styles of teaching. I look forward to reading Groshell’s book.
One question I’m left with comes from this sentence: “If you’re willing to step back, focus on communicating big ideas, and let students apply those ideas with lots of guidance, feedback, and checks for understanding, students can often do more than you think.” What are the “big ideas” that we should focus on? Sometimes I can identify them in the curriculum, but often I feel they are lost in the minutiae of teaching the next mini-skill. The sheer number of standards to cover, for example in 9th grade Algebra 1, often seems to cause the students and I to lose sight of the forest because we are busy investigating each individual tree. Does anyone have a reference or a guide to focusing on the “big ideas”?
I wonder how much of student success comes from the particular educational methodology vs the students being taught by a matter teacher (someone who is investing the time and effort into developing a system is probably going to be better at their job than someone just earning their paycheck) or getting outside support and mentoring (professor and researcher coming in to help teachers implement, and those teachers asking for support is the type of person who is putting in extra effort to improve their craft).
I think that effort to improve your craft as a teacher matters a lot, but I also know I've fooled myself at times in my career. It's just really hard to tell whether something you're doing leads to durable learning. There are lots of things a passionate, committed teacher can try that might seem fun and engaging on the surface but don't lead to more actual learning. So I don't know, I agree that I'd rather have someone investing time and effort but that's not always a sure bet in teaching.
Tangent:
Rosenshine & Liljedahl have roughly the same evidentiary basis for their ideas, yet the ResearchED crowd routinely excoriates one while lauding the other. I don't know what to make of this.
I had never thought about it that way before, that's a great observation. I'm very interested in education research, but I've felt myself becoming more and more bored recently with the randomized controlled trial stuff. It all feels sterile and like it's rehashing the same old ideas. Both Rosenshine and Liljedahl are an important approach, observing teachers, trying things, synthesizing those observations into a larger framework. That's important ed research and is much closer to classrooms, but it's never going to have the authority of a bunch of RCTs.
Hi Dylan. Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean when you say that you are becoming "bored recently with the randomized controlled trial stuff"? Do you mean that you are bored with the argument that those authors don't use RCT's? Thanks.
I'm interested in reading education research, but a lot of RCTs feel very sanitized. It often isn't possible to control exactly one variable in a classroom. So while they can be interesting, I feel like I read versions of the same RCTs over and over again. More descriptive, qualitative research is interesting because it can get at all the connections between different aspects of teaching.
I say this as a big fan (of Dan and his innovation) but with a “critical friend” hat on…
Rosenshine and Liljedahl come from very different research paradigms. Rosenshine studied many teachers across many classrooms to see what the most effective ones had in common. He looked for patterns, then explained those patterns using cognitive science as an explanatory mechanism. His work is broad and steady, aimed at finding what works most of the time.
Liljedahl, on the other hand, works by trying things out with small groups of teachers and students. He tests one idea at a time, changes it, and watches what happens. His work is creative and practical, but fragile. Both offer useful ideas, but they rest on entirely different kinds of evidence and were built in different ways. Implying they are equal in research strength is inaccurate.
I'm not sure I agree. Most of Rosenshine's citations are decades old and some of those fields have evolved since the publications he references. This article explores a bit of what you find when you follow some of those references: https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/criticality-in-evidence-informed-teaching-expansive-learning-with-rosenshine/ Observing teachers is a fraught way to draw broad conclusions, there's so much happening and it's really hard to accurately infer cause and effect.
Rosenshine looked at test scores as indicators of effective teachers. Liljedahl picks a different goal: thinking, which he defines as the opposite of mimicking. There's a value judgment, there, but then he spent a lot of time observing teachers trying different things and picking out the practices that were best at promoting his chosen goal.
I say this as someone who thinks highly of Rosenshine's principles and recommends them. It's really hard to do research that validates a broad construct of effective teaching. You make a good point that Rosenshine uses cognitive science to justify why his conclusions make sense, and that's part of why I find them valuable. But I'm not convinced we can say that Rosenshine's principles are a superior, researched-proven way to teach.
Could it be that there is a positive association between people who prefer a "less direct" style of teaching and people who are associated with the ResearchED crowd mixed with a healthy dose of confirmation bias?
I have a similar question about the evidence for Project Follow Through and the evidence on DI.
It strikes me as akin to empirically super-healthy diets....where almost nobody assigned to that diet sticks to it.
With DI, we have some schools who adopt see large RCT gains, but even in those cases, the program rarely persists. What to make of that?
I have my own theory but I don't know if it's true. I believe that DI gets good results (there's a whole world trying to cast DI research as some big conspiracy theory). Here's a comparison. We know that a strong phonics program is important for reading. But some kids don't need it -- they'll learn to read just fine with something much less structured. And if you talk to early elementary teachers on the front lines of the "science of reading" stuff right now, one thing you often hear is that they feel a bit bad for the kids who don't need it, who learn to read fine without it. They feel like it's too boring, too structured, too much. I think you can draw a parallel with DI -- many kids just don't need that much structure. And the longer those programs persist, the easier it is to focus on all the kids who don't need that structure and would be fine. And it's a big lift for leaders to keep the structure in place. So eventually there's a leadership change, and the pump is primed to shift to something a little less structured.
Curious what you think of that argument, it's one of those ideas I've had bouncing around in my head but I'm not sure it makes sense.
"We know that a strong phonics program is important for reading. But some kids don't need it -- they'll learn to read just fine with something much less structured."
As a reading specialist, this is something I think about all the time and wrote about in Bursting with Knowledge: Are We Overteaching Phonics? (https://highfiveliteracy.com/2024/11/18/bursting-with-knowledge-are-we-overteaching-phonics/)
Interesting! This is something mostly outside my scope professionally, but I find it so fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
Interesting.
I think new leaders come in, the pump is already primed to "change some stuff." In ed leadership, "what gets changed" is usually based on vibes.
I.e., case after case: leaders took away DI, nobody particularly cared even as scores fell steadily....nobody reversed course. There's always plausible excuses that aren't "Ooops we should have kept DI."
We saw that in No Excuses charters, too. And we saw that at Match charter as leaders kept reducing the investment in HDT in favor of teacher vibes.
A related question: why are vibes so powerful in education?
Great job delving into the nuance - I really appreciated how you go beyond the surface-level dichotomy between inquiry-focused and explicit-instruction-focused teaching models to help teachers see that there are key techniques everyone can benefit from incorporating into their repertoire. I wish we had more flexible curricula that incorporated the best of all worlds and were more thoughtful about which techniques to emphasize for which topics.
Thanks! Agreed. It's interesting to me when an idea pops up in multiple places that approach teaching very differently. For instance, the explicit instruction approaches I referenced in the post are all built on a small-step design, breaking skills down into lots of small pieces and giving students chances to practice with each piece. That sounds a lot like thin slicing in Building Thinking Classrooms. Interesting evidence that those folks are all onto something. Unfortunately my current (official) curriculum is not designed in that way whatsoever...
I completely agree that regardless of what type of instructional approach we use, questions, feedback, and engagement with problems or tasks is where learning happens. To me one of the biggest differences between curriculum that is more direct instruction oriented versus those that are more inquiry based is the length and volume of tasks that students respond to and whether they have been given a worked example before attempting them or if they will intentionally be exploring the task without having seen that. If there was a better understanding of the question and feedback aspect of direct instruction as you explained then there also might be more recognition that the two approaches are not necessarily in opposition and could be logically combined into one lesson format.
Yup. And the other piece is that people learn best when you build on what they already know. To generalize very broadly, I know lots of inquiry-focused teachers who are really good at sequencing ideas and building on what kids already know, checking for understanding and giving feedback, and guiding practice, but aren't great at structuring independent practice or regular review. I know explicit-instruction-focused teachers who are great at the modeling and independent practice pieces, but aren't great at connecting to prior knowledge or breaking content into small steps. Everyone benefits when we build on what they're already good at, and try to help them understand how some new ideas can complement things they're already doing. Coming in and saying "what you're doing is bad and you should step" is a recipe for teachers to ignore you.
This is an important piece, now more than ever. We are so lucky to have so many remarkable educators like Zach helping us become better teachers, but you rightly point out that some of the details get lost in translation. Here's my own example expressed in an email to Zach about his interview with Carl Hendrick.
"Great discussion with the great Carl Hendrick. On the one hand, I hesitate to criticize him. On the other hand, he is very pro-teacher, so as someone who taught Of Mice and Men to sophomores over many years, I feel obligated to weigh in. First, let me echo what the two of you emphasized: direct instruction is highly interactive, which is a must. And I certainly agree that all the fluff (to quote Anita Archer) related to butcher paper assignments that waste time and pull students away from the learning is not the way to go.
BUT--that's not to say that we need to go to the opposite extreme and spoonfeed answers. That exchange between teacher and student about whether George shot Lennie is begging for bringing in the book and looking back for evidence to support what happened. No need for the teacher to give answers because the students are capable of finding them in the text, making claims and supporting them with the author's words.
SO--I found Carl's attitude toward that anecdote super surprising, and, unfortunately, if feeds right into what some educators hate about direct instruction: their perception that students are just given answers rather than being shown how to find them, turning them into passive rather than active learners.
Otherwise--great interview!"
Thanks for sharing! I haven't listened to that episode. Also a good example of how contextual teaching is. It's really hard to make broad generalizations that are true across contexts, everything depends.
The craft of explanation deserves more attention, not less. Most teachers haven’t been taught how to do it well (or at all).
For me, Just Tell Them is about making “explaining” more intentional. Scripting a worked example (or CFU question, or rollout of a new routine) forces you to think hard about precision, sequencing, and terminology. That rehearsal makes the whole lesson tighter (I often toss the script once class starts).
I use Craig Barton’s variation theory resources often. I only script the first worked example. After that, students do the majority of the thinking. But that one clear example sets the tone. It is not the amount of explaining that matters. It is how well you do it.
*Adam Boxer’s Teaching Secondady Science is an exemplar application of the theory in Zach’s book.
I think I agree with you. I learned a lot from Just Tell Them. My issue is more with the framing of the book and the framing of lots of conversations around explicit instruction. You allude to something that I feel strongly -- it's the pieces around the explanations that matter a lot. I also use variation theory as a way to structure practice, and I find that to be a really important variable in setting students up for success.
To give a different example, prior knowledge is a really important piece of explanations. Making sure students know everything they need to know to understand the explanation, and connecting that explanation to what they know. Zach doesn't spend much time on that in Just Tell Them, and that's my biggest criticism of the book. It's another example of how the pieces around explanation are just as important as the explanation itself.
Recently my admin noted the growth shown in my students’ MAP scores; when asked “What did you do?”, I couldn’t respond on the spot in one sentence, because as you said one sentence can’t capture all that I do.
Absolutely. Unfortunately a lot of teachers and leaders like to simplify teaching down to one thing, which often sounds nice but isn't helpful for anyone.
As others mentioned, this was a particularly strong blog by you DK. Nice.
On your "what is powerful besides Just Tell Them"....I would say another feature of Engelmann's DI is the....craftsmanship. The artisanal detail of those instructions is quite high.
Most scripted instruction gets key details wrong, which shows up in real classrooms pretty quickly. The skilled teachers overcome the script, like a great actor in an off off Bway venue overcoming a bad play. But the typical actor can't overcome it; the audience leaves at intermission.
Yea I agree. That was my biggest takeaway -- the thoughtful sequencing alone is something that really impressed me. Then the attention to the structure of examples/non-examples, unambiguous wording, and more. Lots for teachers to learn from.
Even unscripted stuff makes a lot of mistakes. I was talking to a few teacher friends recently about how a lot of publishers seemingly rushed out curriculum in recent years that had obvious, if-you-had-thoroughly-field-tested-this-you-would've-caught-these-mistakes issues. Lessons that completely forget about certain skills, make huge conceptual jumps, don't build off of the representations from last year, and more. It's really hard to do curriculum well, and when you read about the way Engelmann put DI together it's obvious it's just head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of field testing and refining all the little details.
Bro (bruh says my teen), don't get me started.
It's not just "rushed" field testing. It's typically ZERO field testing by the publisher.
Moreover, the insane system is EdReports "reviews" currics - without ever watching it inside classrooms. They're like movie reviewers who read the script and never watch the movie.
My story: as Common Core rolled out there were a lot of curricula that moved a few units around, slapped the "Common Core" label on, and called it a day. There was very quickly demand for some way to do quality control on standards alignment. A small, scrappy nonprofit stepped in to fill the void. It did a pretty good job of telling schools whether a curriculum was standards-aligned. But they were the only game in town, no one ever showed up to compete, and a simple service of checking standards alignment became conflated with "is this curriculum good?" Somehow that is now the status quo.
Reading about the field testing DI does is wild. Totally different than anything that happens today. I know a few people who have done some curriculum work and...I don't understand why publishers are in such a massive rush to publish these programs.
Great piece! I appreciate your argument that for all the talk of explanation, that’s not really where most classroom time is allotted in these examples. I also appreciate, and try to practice, the idea of pulling bits and pieces from lots of different curriculums and styles of teaching. I look forward to reading Groshell’s book.
One question I’m left with comes from this sentence: “If you’re willing to step back, focus on communicating big ideas, and let students apply those ideas with lots of guidance, feedback, and checks for understanding, students can often do more than you think.” What are the “big ideas” that we should focus on? Sometimes I can identify them in the curriculum, but often I feel they are lost in the minutiae of teaching the next mini-skill. The sheer number of standards to cover, for example in 9th grade Algebra 1, often seems to cause the students and I to lose sight of the forest because we are busy investigating each individual tree. Does anyone have a reference or a guide to focusing on the “big ideas”?
I can't point to one. Which is a shame. It's something that always takes me time to learn when I teach new content.
I wonder how much of student success comes from the particular educational methodology vs the students being taught by a matter teacher (someone who is investing the time and effort into developing a system is probably going to be better at their job than someone just earning their paycheck) or getting outside support and mentoring (professor and researcher coming in to help teachers implement, and those teachers asking for support is the type of person who is putting in extra effort to improve their craft).
I think that effort to improve your craft as a teacher matters a lot, but I also know I've fooled myself at times in my career. It's just really hard to tell whether something you're doing leads to durable learning. There are lots of things a passionate, committed teacher can try that might seem fun and engaging on the surface but don't lead to more actual learning. So I don't know, I agree that I'd rather have someone investing time and effort but that's not always a sure bet in teaching.